go ahead and destroy this

"The security of Society lies in custom and unconscious instinct, and the basis of the stability of Society, as a healthy organism, is the complete absence of any intelligence amongst its members."
- Oscar Wilde


Now that the economy is circling the toilet bowl, with the real estate market as toilet paper, interest rates are plummeting to historic lows. According to the Wall Street Journal, this theoretically makes for an ideal time to buy a home. Now all I have to worry about now is possibly losing my job, or falling seriously ill, or embarking on some other extravagantly expensive project like an engagement or a wedding or something.

After briefly flirting with the idea of moving westward, or southward, or elseward, J. and I have decided to stick around the Washington D.C. area for a while. And thus begins The Great House-Hunt of 2009. In advance of the actual shopping, we are performing our due dilligence by applying for mortgages with a variety of lenders.

This kind of endeavor, to say nothing of the actual purchase itself, requires a very thorough examination of one's personal finances. As they should, loan officers want a complete, high-definition picture of the applicant's worth, including: investment assets, liquid assets, solid assets, gaseous assets, god-given assets, livestock, stock options, preferred stock, shitty stock, pension plans, savings plans, health plans, career plans, career goals, career assists, MVP awards, outstanding debts, average debts, debit cards, credit cards, credit scores, partial credit, extra credit, extracurricular activities, co-curricular activities, educational transcripts, medical records, criminal records, The Police records, get-out-of-jail-free cards, one's current residence, prior residences, future residences, family planning, family history, U.S. history (specifically "The Gilded Age"), proof of American citizenship, passports, fingerprints, dental records, blood samples and any current and past medications. The rectal exam is optional, in lieu of the essay portion.

It's bad enough that this process forces me to actually look at all my equity investments -- For several months I had been consciously avoiding even sidelong glances at my retirement portfolio, which now looks like it has been carpet-bombed by the Germans -- but each of these little bits of information require me to enter my user ID and password.

Yesterday alone I had to retrieve five different user IDs and passwords. It was a real pain in the ass. And it doesn't even count the numerous logins I unconsciously complete every day for my e-mail, etc. There are logins for everything. Many of you are logged into this very Web site right now. At least I have an unusual last name -- I can't even imagine how difficult it is for someone named Pete Johnson or something, who must have to come up with weird IDs like "fluffernutterlovr12" or "p00p10rd&!"

Sometimes I think about inventing a service that would store all of a person's passwords so they would never have to remember them or write them down and leave them lying around the house. But of course, you would need to password-protect that site with a super-ultra password of its own, and you would have to make it 100% no-shit hacker-proof, and you would have to hire an ascetic Mormon samurai with Government Security Clearance just to safeguard the database. So it probably wouldn't work.

Instinctually my next desire would be for a global standardization of password protocols, so that I wouldn't have to make up 20 different passwords for 20 different sites, all of whom have different rules for length, symbols, number of alphanumeric characters, etc. (One site restricted me from repeating any character within the password; for example, "Tennessee911" would not have been allowed, even if it were backwards.) But, of course, then people would just use the same password for everything, blithely paving the way for identity theft and fascist world domination.

And at that point, it would just be expedient for us to have no passwords at all -- no firewalls, no phishing, no privacy. We'd go back to the honor system. Or maybe it goes all the way back to survival of the fittest. It's like an elegant amalgam of socialism and free-market philosophy.

Yeah, of course that doesn't make any sense. I don't want other people peeking at my 401(k) plan. Although I must admit, I like the idea of someone else absorbing the losses for a while.

"Society is a masked ball, where every one hides his real character, and reveals it by hiding"
- Ralph Waldo Emerson


Today I attended a business meeting on social media. An internationally renowned communications company invited me and a work colleague to have a chat about the power of social media and how it can help us achieve our business and public policy objectives.

The discussion was all about thinking of the Internet in general (and social media, in particular) as not so much a tool but a collection of communities. By harnessing and building these communities, so the thinking goes, we can establish ourselves as a leader on our public policy issues. Or maybe it was building and then harnessing. Possibly it would be necessary to build a harness. To tell you the truth I kind of zoned out there, briefly.

The point is -- and I knew this before I even got in the meeting room -- that social media constitutes the new paradigm. I had already mastered blogging, but the ethos of blogging is practically unipolar. The fully actualized citizen must graduate to more interactive and communal enterprises. Facebook, YouTube, Twitter ... these are today's telephony.

I had good reasons for avoiding these places (bad prior experiences, techno-agoraphobia, social malaise) and bad reasons (knee-jerk contrarianism, crippling insecurity, fear of commitment). Maybe I was just being a reactionary blowhard about it.

Sometimes, when a person is loathe to be the last person to laugh at a joke, they pretend they don't get it.

But Facebook is starting to remind me of the cell phone craze earlier in this decade. I was initially reluctant to embrace the concept of a mobile phone, philosophically convinced that it would be an electronic tether to a cruel and intrusive world, precluding my precious solitude. Eventually I realized that I was being stupid, and now I can call someone when I get lost.

So I guess it's about time I "Faced" up. I can no longer avoid the implications for my profession, which demands facility with social networking technology. And despite my own personal magnetism, I can no longer afford to be out of the loop with friends and family -- not when I find myself hearing second-hand about engagements, expectancies and nonfat mocha soy lattes.

And in three weeks, I won't be updating this page daily anymore. So I might as well give you kind readers another way to keep track of me.

So, as of now, you can find me on Facebook. Which means one of two things will happen: Facebook will go the way of Friendster, and everyone will migrate to something new, probably called "Squaggle" or "Chubbster" or something; or it will consume my life, connecting me to all people and places in such a way that I will become one with the universe, in which case I can give up my cell phone.

"The bed is a bundle of paradoxes: we go to it with reluctance, yet we quit it with regret; we make up our minds every night to leave it early, but we make up our bodies every morning to keep it late."
- Charles Caleb Colton


What does it mean to be a "morning person" or a "night person"? Does a person have to be one or the other?

I could be considered a night person, since I tend not to go to bed until near midnight. I am generally awake and alert well until the time I decide to hit the sack. In fact, I usually have to drag myself to bed rather than watch a half-hour more of TV, or read another chapter of a book, or play one more game of Madden football on my PlayStation.

But the term "night person" carries the implication the the person likes the nightlife, likes to boogie, etc. As a rule, I dislike the nightlife, disdain nightspots and detest nightclubs. It is not a social time of the day for me, but rather a time for relaxation and reflection.

So maybe I'm a morning person. I normally have no problem getting up when my alarm goes off; I see it as a matter of will rather than a matter of physical fortitude. And once I'm up, I'm up. My morning routine of shower-shave-breakfast-toothbrush-dress-depart, once activated, is unstoppable.

But then again, "morning person" connotes someone who is naturally very cheery and chipper in the morning, which I am not. I am rarely very happy to get out of bed and start my day. I like sleep just as much as the next person. I just can't escape the inevitability of the day, and I figure that I might as well just get on with it.

In fact, I often have to bribe myself with the thought that if I just get up in the morning and go to work, I can go back to sleep as soon as I get home. Of course, this never happens, because once I'm home at the end of the day, I want to stay up.

The end result is that I'm never particularly well-rested and I'm never particularly chipper. I think that I could pull off a siesta somewhere around 2:30 in the afternoon, but I suspect my boss might have an objection to that. He seems to rise early and turn in late, too.

"Any reviewer who expresses rage and loathing for a novel is preposterous. He or she is like a person who has put on full armor and attacked a hot fudge sundae."
- Kurt Vonnegut


I arrived late to the party. In March of 1999, some random sophomore at the Campus Times waved the now-iconic Rolling Stones cover in front of my face and told me that Britney Spears was the future of pop music. I promptly sneered and forgot her name for the next year, as she became the most popular entertainer on the planet.

It seems impossible to imagine now that she could escape anyone's consciousness for a year. But these were the days before iTunes, YouTube and TMZ, and there was fair reason to believe that she was just another recyclable pop starlet in the vein of Tiffany or Clay Aiken. In the late 1990s and early aughts, it was difficult to actually see Spears perform unless you staked out MTV in the vain hope that they might actually show a music video.

Eventually, though, like most heterosexual males between the ages of 12 and 40, I was drawn in by her guileless combination of cheeky innuendo and wounded vulnerability, an obvious but effective evocation of the Virgin-Tease archetype. Unlike Nabakov's Lolita, who calculatedly appealed to man's cynicism, Spears was like your best friend's wayward kid sister, appealing to man's curiosity. The subtextual lust was still illicit, of course, but somehow more defensible.

This formula proved more powerful and enduring than Jessica Simpson's pure-as-the-driven-snow coquettishness, or Christina Aguilera's "hey-look-at-me-I'm-so-bad" schtick, or the "fuck-you-you'll-never-understand-me" angst of Avril Lavigne. And Spears and her handlers expertly wielded this power in the service of multimedia domination.

Her music was actually okay if you weren't listening very hard, like during cardio workouts or homeward commutes. But more conceptually, Britney Spears epitomized mindless entertainment. She was zero-sum; her image distracted us from the music, and the music distracted us from the image.

Not only was her act essentially meaningless, her meaninglessness was essential. It was like a purely superficial form of nihilism: Britney Spears became rich and famous by giving us nothing, and making us want more of it.

I don't remember what kind of critical reception Spears received for her first two albums. My memory and familiarity with the pop-tart genre are limited but I assume that her efforts were not much better or worse than that of her peers. At any rate, formal music reviews were practically irrelevant in the context of such a mass-media juggernaut. Even if a jaded music critic had been compelled to shout "Hey, you suck!" into this echo chamber of awestruck oohs and aahs, it not only would have been like trying to karate-chop a tidal wave, it would have been missing the story.

But somewhere around her "I'm a Slave 4 U" gambit, the relationship between Spears and her audience started to change. Her increasingly sexualized tone simultaneously eroded the Virgin and Tease elements of her persona. Her marginally experimental musical evolution, in which she infused bubblegum pop with more synthetic dance club conventions, alienated a cohort of her fans. The music world itself started looking for The Next Britney, training its focus on younger stars (like Animatronic Miley Cyrus and the plasticine performers of High School Musical) and more talented artists (like the vocally gifted Aguilera and the self-assured Beyonce). Spears, who had once marginalized the entire music industry, was herself professionally marginalized.

Meanwhile, the Entertainment-Industrial Complex exploded. The world learned all too quickly about her superstar excesses, her party-girl indulgences and her tabloid relationship with then-androgynous dreamboat Justin Timberlake. The seeds of a good-old-fashioned American backlash were planted.

Then, within the span of two years: Crossroads, her foray into movies, bombed; her lengthy relationship with Timberlake collapsed; her parents divorced; and September 11, 2001, fundamentally altered American life.

Add to that these facts: this is a girl who grew up dirt-poor in rural Louisiana; she posesses no better than a public high school education; her developmental childhood was fractured by Hollywood; she was forced to be the sole breadwinner for her entire family; and by 2003, the paparazzi -- emboldened and encouraged by the celebrity gossip industry -- was documenting her every single move, every day.

After all that, would it be shocking if she had an acute nervous breakdown? Should we be surprised if she retreated into drugs, alcohol and unhealthy relationships? Isn't it possible that these events triggered a serious mental illness?

But still, people hate her. Her latest album, Circus, has been met with largely negative reviews on its merits, which is entirely appropriate. But within many of these critiques is an undercurrent of personal hostility and mockery that I find distasteful. Why does she bother people so much?

Is it because she is inescapable on our television screens, Web pages and magazine covers? No, it is our guilty indulgence in these items that keep the paparazzi in business. Does anyone really believe that she wants to live her entire life in front of the cameras?

Is it because she's not a very good singer? Are we to fault her for a lack of vocal prowess despite the fact that she makes a very good living as a performer? Does anyone really believe that she doesn't work hard at what she does? (Watch her perform live before you answer.)

Is it because her personal life is such a mess? Is there anyone who didn't make regrettable mistakes in their 20s? Doesn't it seem likely that our own errors in judgment might have been even bigger with limited supervision and an unlimited budget? Who is entitled to judge a young, single mother of two?

Is it because she's too dumb? Too calculating? Too skinny? Too fat? A "bad example," whatever that is? What the hell do we want from her, and why are we asking it of a 27-year old pop star?

My guess: just as America's hopes and dreams were projected onto the inspirational but embryonic figure of Barack Obama, Britney Spears personifies America's fear and self-loathing. She is, popularly imagined, an artificial, superficial, anti-intellectual triumph of style over substance -- born of poverty, built by ambition and awash in sin. Perhaps, as Obama represents the best of what America could be, Spears represents the worst of what America is. And we hate her for it.

Just a theory. I don't know if it's true, but it's certainly not fair.

I am no more qualified to psychoanalyze her than the social pundits are, and I don't know if she really is struggling with mental illness or if she's just another poor little rich girl. But we do know that she's a human being. Don't buy her album if you don't want to. But maybe you could give her a break.

"...I was a Flower of the mountain yes when I put the rose in my hair like the Andalusian girls used or shall I wear a red yes and how he kissed me under the Moorish wall and I thought well as well him as another and then I asked him with my eyes to ask again yes and then he asked me would I yes to say yes my mountain flower and first I put my arms around him yes and drew him down to me so he could feel my breasts all perfume yes and his heart was going like mad and yes I said yes I will Yes."
- excerpt of "Molly Bloom's soliloquy" from James Joyce's Ulysses


I decided to propose marriage to my girlfriend way back in mid-September. But under our governing social customs, you can't just ask someone to marry you all willy-nilly, like you're requesting extra bread. No, you have to show that you really mean it by also offering a significant piece of jewelry -- jewelry that, by the way, must symbolize, characterize and quantify your relationship while also appealing to her unique aesthetic sensibilities.

Eagerly, I endeavored to do so. I discreetly sought counsel from a prior purchaser as well as a former recipient of such baubles, consulted online resources like BlueNile.com and aDiamondisForever.com, and surveyed various jewelry retailers to find the perfect token of my undying love.

Perhaps my decision-making was too belabored, stretching well into October. Working with a committed and interminably patient retail sales associate, I finally settled on the most beautiful ring I had seen. (Pictures and flowery description available upon request.) I was informed that four to six weeks would be required for the designer to make the ring by hand. Apparently they do not just have these gorgeous items lying around the warehouse.

This matched up almost perfectly with my target proposal date, the few days between my birthday and Thanksgiving. It would be ideal, I figured, if J. and I could make the happy announcement in the company of her extended family.

It soon became clear that the ring was not going to be ready for my birthday, but I was informed with a high level of confidence that the ring would be finished for me to pick up on the night of Tuesday, November 25 -- the night before we left for Detroit. Not perfect, but okay -- I would still have Tuesday night and all of Wednesday to give her my rhapsody.

But something happened, who knows what, that delayed the ring's release from the designer, meaning that it was going to be delivered late to the jeweler (to insert the diamond). The plan then became to finish the ring on Wednesday and send it overnight so that I would receive it on Thursday, Thanksgiving morning. Certainly not preferable, but manageable; perhaps I could do my thing before we left for her uncle's house, or even sneak away at some point before the feast.

(This also meant that I would have to concoct some kind of ruse to (a) obtain her mother's mailing address and (b) explain why I was receiving an urgent package over a holiday weekend. So I made up a story about a critical developing pension-related news story and leaving my Blackberry at work. I suppose I therefore owe a partial thank-you to the U.S. government, without whose chronic incompetence this excuse would not have been plausible.)

Then, on Wednesday afternoon, my dedicated and interminably patient retail sales associate phoned me to say that the jeweler's official selected shipping provider did not deliver overnight packages on holidays, which meant that it would have to wait until Friday morning. Annoying, because it meant a Thanksgiving spiced with marriage-related innuendo, but defensible in that the extended family was allowed a chance to give me -- in political parlance -- a thorough "vetting".

Later, on Wednesday evening, I was informed that -- whoops -- the designer had sent the item to the jeweler's corporate headquarters, rather than the jeweler's actual jeweler, which meant that it had to be overnighted from the Jeweler to the Jeweler's jeweler before the stone could be set and the ring could then be overnighted to me, on Saturday morning. Theoretically.

At this, I was starting to panic, not only because the anticipation was driving me bananas, but because we were due to leave on Sunday and if there were any more delays I was going to have to have it re-routed back to Washington D.C. Not to mention the fact that it only gave me a 24-hour window to actually propose, with earlier being better so that J. could fully celebrate the moment with her mom.

My dedicated and interminably patient retail sales associate, living up to his moniker and ensuring my lifetime brand loyalty, assured me that the package would indeed arrive before 10 a.m. on Saturday. It was basically my last best shot.

So I spent the next 36 hours sweating, suffering, tossing, turning and toiling until I could finally get up at the crack of dawn on Saturday and wait for my "blackberry" to arrive. And when it did arrive, it was everything I had hoped for (besides, you know, being on time).

And so, aided only by some private, prepared remarks, I gave J. the shiniest wake-up call ever. And she gave me the best Thanksgiving of my life. There were some tears, lots of hugs and many, many phone calls. Odyssey aside, it was practically perfect.

Except for one thing: the ring is the wrong size.

But you know, the ring itself is secondary to the "yes." There's a certain, satisfying ring to that.

"Applause is the spur of noble minds, the end and aim of weak ones."
- variously attributed to Edmund Burke and Charles Caleb Colton


As part of a weekend-long birthday celebration, J. took me to a musical at Arena Stage on Sunday night. Next to Normal is an slightly avant-garde rock musical about a family matriarch's chronic pathological psychosis. Just the kind of light entertainment fare you want before spending Thanksgiving with the family.

It was, as you might expect, a real downer, making "Hamlet" look like Disney on Ice. But it was well-staged and ably performed, overall a solid production. At the appropriate intervals, I rewarded the cast and crew with sincere applause.

But something happened at the end of the musical that troubled me, something that I've noticed is far too common these days. The crowd (of, I'd guess, 800 people) gave a standing ovation.

It's not like I'm a big theater buff or anything, but I know a little bit about stagecraft, and this was not a "Standing-O" situation. Standing ovations should be reserved for truly sublime, compelling or transcendent performances. Standing ovations are the equivalent of "Wow!" Wows are rare.

But it seems like every time I go to see a live work of drama, no matter what the scale or quality, standing ovations have become the norm. Consequently, standing ovations have become cheap. It's getting to be like standing ovations are the next sitting ovations; for audiences to show their appreciation, they're going to have to start jumping up and down.

I can think of a number of reasons why standing ovations have become so commonplace, none of them good reasons:

• Feelings of Inferiority. Public speaking is one of humanity's most common phobias. Additional millions of people are convinced that they cannot carry a tune. Individuals with an extremely acute fear of heights may have difficulty standing on an elevated stage. So it makes sense that these hapless wannabes would have their minds blown when they see others doing with ease what they cannot do themselves. I imagine these people also applaud sunsets, airplane landings and knitting.
  
  
• Peer Pressure. Standing ovations can be contageous, but not because we want to be like that first standing guy -- it's because we don't want to look like the asshole. Or maybe because we're standing behind the first standing guy, and we don't want to miss any action, in case one of the actors accidentally falls into the orchestra pit or something.
  
  
• Boredom. Let's face it, sitting through a play or musical, even a good or great one, can be a little tiresome. We're talking about an entirely passive and confining experience that often lasts at least two hours. I'll bet that some of these clowns are just so excited to be able to do something, to somehow participate, that they leap to their feat at the earliest opportunity.
  
  
• Self-aggrandizement. Other people, perhaps driven by a codependent need to please-and-be-pleased, are so eager to be in a "good crowd" that they try to make it happen. The end result is a real lovefest between the actors and the audience. "You're great!" "No, you're great." "No, you." "No, you!" I'm guessing that most of these folks are failed actors themselves.
  
  
• Age and infirmity. Most theater patrons are old. After a two-hour musical, they are likely just making sure they can still walk, or are perhaps trying to get a head start to the restroom.
  

I beg my theater-going peers to toughen their standards and withhold their standing ovations for only the most deserving of performances. A fair and consistent applause standard is the only way to both ensure continued dramatic quality control and maintain the value of our accolades.

Do you see the people stand? Will you be strong and sit with me?
All of the actors on the stage will surely understand, you'll see --
If it's really, really good, you can applaud with all your heart
Otherwise keep it in your seat when the clapping starts!

"It is amazing what can be accomplished when nobody cares about who gets the credit."
- Robert Yates

Ghostwriting is a basic part of my job. Often I will be called upon to write essays, columns and op-eds detailing the vagaries of public policy, then sign someone else's name to them.

When I first told J. about this particular job duty, she was offended on my behalf. "They're taking credit for your work!" she said. "Doesn't that make you angry?"

Once in a while, when I'm particularly proud of something, signing it away feels like giving up my baby for adoption. But it generally doesn't bother me, for a number of reasons.

Practically, I consider it just another crummy work task. Unless you are self-employed, every task involves some measure of indignity, because you're doing something that someone else ought to be able to do themselves if they'd just try -- whether it's giving you stitches, or scanning your groceries, or growing your corn.

Honestly, I think I'm a better writer than most of the people I write for, anyway. So, rather than letting them draft something and having to edit it, or worse, letting them draft something without me looking at it first, is just bad for the company. It sounds paradoxical, but this system actually makes me feel like I'm in control.

Realistically, no one reads these stupid articles anyway, unless they're truly desperate for reading material that will negate their consciousness.

And actually, I get quite enough attention these days from relentless reporters, who keep asking if they can quote me on this or that, practically begging me to screw up and say something halfway interesting. I am quite content to stay in the background and let my words do all the work. There's a reason my name isn't on this journal anywhere.

"The test of the first rate mind is the ability to hold two opposing thoughts at the same time while still retaining the ability of function."
- F. Scott Fitzgerald


Today, while on a late-mid-afternoon smoothie run, I passed by the downtown Planned Parenthood office. There was a small, silver-haired woman standing by herself just off the sidewalk, holding a rosary and singing a hymn in a soft soprano.

I've noticed groups standing vigil outside that office before, looking like an uneasy amalgam of a church picnic and an angry mob. But it was a chilly day today, not Rochester-quality frigid or anything, but cold, with the kind of crisp, dry wind that seems to poke holes through your skin. So she was there alone, her voice and talisman shivering, her spirit stoic. It was stirring, in a number of ways.

When I was in eighth grade, my first-period Social Studies teacher, Mr. Bianchi, devised an ill-conceived lesson plan on the topic of abortion. I don't remember the point he was trying to make and I can't imagine what kind of truth he was expecting to divine from callow 14-year olds, but his great idea was to separate everyone in the classroom according to their own position, "anti-abortion" and "pro-abortion," and have a debate.

As it happens, my hometown had a large and vibrant Catholic population (Mr. Bianchi, also the school football coach, was himself large, vibrant and Catholic, and as I recall not altogether bright) and was socially rather conservative. So when the 25 students split up, 23 of them were on the "anti-abortion" side of the room and I was on the other, along with "Maresh," a gentle soul whose Hindu parents had emigrated from India.The lack of sufficient seating on that side of the room forced half of the class to stand, creating the illusion of a gathering posse.

For "some" reason, Mr. Bianchi also sat on the "anti-abortion" side of the room. He then attempted to poke and prod us into a free exchange of ideas.

As a 14-year-old I was just worldly enough to understand that I was pro-choice but not nearly practiced enough to enunciate my philosophy. (I vaguely recall blabbering something about "orphanages.") As I struggled to explain myself, the exercise turned sharply prosecutorial. I remember Mr. Bianchi asking me, "what about all the mentally challenged kids out there? Should we round them up and kill them, too?", the rhetorical equivalent of a battering ram. At one point I turned to Maresh as if to ask for a little help, but he just shrugged and whispered that he thought he was on the wrong side.

Eighteen years later, I still have trouble mustering a rebuttal to the anti-abortion crowd. It isn't and has never been a lifeblood political issue for me. I'm not even sure if I think about it as a women's rights issue.

I think of it as an issue of science, based on the practical (if spiritually flimsy) supposition that a first-trimester fetus is not an independent or sentient creature. A cold and antiseptic rationalization this may be, but I find it an effective defense against an argument based mostly on heat.

I think of it as an issue of public health, under the realistic premise that a world without legal abortions would be a world with thousands of illicit, unsanctioned and dangerous abortions -- and thousands of avoidable deaths.

And I think of a personal experience, a few short years after that Social Studies class, sitting on my girlfriend's bed and waiting for the pregnancy test to come back negative. We were fortunate (although that seems a weird way to put it), in that a teen pregnancy might well have ruined at least two promising futures.

But even as I sat on that bed, seriously mulling the unsavory alternatives, I thought about the idea of that child, part-me and part-her, and the whole beautiful humanity of it all. And that same instinct, writ large, is at the heart of a notion I can't escape: It is hard to reconcile the idea that any country, much less this one, tolerates the killing of an unborn child.

It is difficult for me to imagine either side, each so thoroughly and profoundly invested in the righteousness of their cause, ever ceding the moral high ground and coming around to the other's way of thinking. It is a fight without a compromise, solution or attrition.

Today, at the corner 16th and L Streets, I saw soldiers on the front lines of that battle. That standoff stirred me morally, emotionally and intellectually. And it made me so proud of this country, which extends freedom of protest to all philosophies.

Pro-life, pro-choice, pro-whatever. I strive to resist labels. Life is freedom. Freedom is choice. It's all the same. I'll just imagine that that's what they're fighting for.

"A penny will hide the biggest star in the universe if you hold it close enough to your eye."
- Samuel Grafton


Ever since the global economy started to circle the bowl about two months ago, I've taken to watching CNBC during the weekday. And no, it's not just about Erin Burnett.


Her free-market appeal makes me want to laissez-faire with the "invisible hand"

CNBC is one of the few channels I can keep on my office television without drawing the fish-eye from bosses and coworkers. To the outside observer, watching CNBC is the television equivalent to reading The Economist, or having bookshelves full of leather-bound volumes. It makes me, the viewer, both feel and appear erudite, intelligent and important.

Because the whole idea of CNBC is based on the same pretentious principle that has made the Wall Street Journal such a successful brand: the idea that all news is ultimately financial news; the notion that every single thing that happens has an economic cause and an economic effect. This is a very superficial and self-involved way of looking at problems, but that doesn't mean it's untrue.

We are a capitalist society, and as you well know, the last two months have been chock-full of economic cause-and-effect. Since many of financial/business reporters and analysts necessarily adhere to established business principles, the coverage sometimes veers dangerously close to outright advocacy.

But, in this way, CNBC's reporting often paradoxically yields the most objective coverage. Because all information is examined through this prism -- "what does this mean for my money?" -- The coverage tends to be more cold-hearted and practical than hot-blooded and political, governed by facts and undistracted by personalities.

It's like a food reporter. It's a lot easier, and perhaps more useful, to report on the objective measures of a steak (i.e., the size, how hot it is) and speculate on its flavor than it is to subjectively describe how it tastes.

A lot of news outlets focus on flavor. For example, if you care about things like rights -- not just human rights, worker rights, civil rights, etc., but what is Right and who is Wrong -- CNBC is not the station for you. Tune in to CNN. "Rights" do not exist in the business universe any more than they exist in the animal kingdom. CNBC and the financial world are about survival.

The general survival of the American economy has a direct impact on my employment, increasingly on a day-to-day level. And I can't help but watch as the sky falls. CNBC specializes in this kind of meteorology. But it's not just the suits and CEOs that are freaking out. The financial panic is infecting everyone, including friends and family.

Everyone, it seems, except all the goddamn people at my local shopping mall. J. and I went out this weekend and happened into the Fashion Centre at Pentagon City, four floors of unrelenting retail. I swear, we could not move three feet in any direction without bumping into a shopper and/or their bulging Nordstrom bags. Macy's was mobbed; The Gap appeared to have been filled-in; The Victoria's Secret checkout line looked like a queue for Oprah tickets. Recession, my ass.

I realize that "flagging consumer confidence" is just one supposed aspect of our current economic quagmire, and the real challenge rests in stimulating big-ticket purchases like homes, cars and vacations. And maybe my anecdotal observation is isolated to the local economy. It could simply be that everyone was at the mall because there were no decent movies playing and all the college football games were lousy.

But one of the few upsides to the current economy was going to be an easier walk through the mall. So much for my sterling silver lining. Everyone is saying that this holiday season will be a bloodbath for retailers, but based on my half-hour adventure this weekend, it sounds like maybe it won't be as bloody as everyone says.

Either way, my guess is that we won't see a lot of complaints about signs like this: